Data Talks

"Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States" https://t.co/0BgDb0r8LT

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) December 19, 2023

 

Data Talks

Correlations between parenting behaviors and personality were generally not significant at this paper's pre-registered significance threshold (p < .003) and they generally weren't conventionally significant (p < .05) either. https://t.co/gQzp0Jq9kf pic.twitter.com/fy614WxyJl

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) December 18, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

The unbelievable geometry of a puffer fish skeleton.

This structure allows them to gain water inside themselves in a moment of danger and inflate. At the same time, the spikes rise and the fish becomes thorny. pic.twitter.com/oCNJQsiDW2

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 19, 2023

 

Decision-making cycle times and differences in risk profile

From Social Psychology and Business by Arnold Kling, his review of The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee.  

In the middle of the last century, the American economy was dominated by heavy industry, making automobiles, steel, and other manufactured goods for the mass market. The business culture that evolved in those industries stressed planning and top-down control, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued in The New Industrial State. The leaders of such firms were allocating massive amounts of capital in irreversible ways, as in the decision to build a new plant. Needing to get these decisions right, corporate leaders relied on a cumbersome evaluation process in which each proposal was examined by a cadre of division managers and their staff analysts.

Today, much of the capital in American business consists of software systems, not physical plant and equipment. Managed correctly, this software capital can be acquired—and changed—much more quickly than physical capital. This environment rewards an entirely different management culture, what McAfee calls the Geek Way, that today’s successful business leaders have arrived at.

I have not read The Geek Way.  However, I do frequently focus on the S-curve of innovation and adoption.  In 1900, if you were to introduce some new technology such as electric refrigerators, it would take 40-50 years to reach market saturation (and commoditization).  In 2000 it was more like 10-15 years.  Now it is perhaps 5-10 years.  

Very early in my consulting career I became attuned to the articulation that as a project manager, you should never let the mean time of implementation exceed the mean time of business and technological change.

Given a set of problems for which it is a solution, if you are implementing an IT solution that will take five years to become operational but the technology, market demand, and competitive threats are on shorter cycles, then you are guaranteed to be in trouble.  The solution has to be in the market before the change.

And that is increasingly hard to do.  

The quoted section above is I think a usefully true description of what has happened but there is a slightly different way of considering it.  The mean time of implementation in the real world of big capital projects which are physical have longer lead times than capital projects which are essentially digital/conceptual.  

The conclusion is probably the same but I think there is a nuance.  In both cases, the cycle time of decision-making is shortening (with all sorts of ramifications.)  Management techniques and tools have to accommodate that.

But the nature of what is being decided upon (physical assets versus digital/conceptual assets) also invite different approaches independent of the cycle times and more related because of the difference in their respective risk profiles.

The inexplicable rise and quite explicable fall

A very articulate point.  From Claudine Gay: the great DEI grift exposed by Martin Hackworth.  The subheading is, amusingly, Will no one rid us of these meddlesome thieves?

Gay’s inexplicable rise and quite explicable fall illustrate, in a difficult-to-misinterpret fashion, the plain grift that is the DEI industry.

You can explain and attempt to justify DEI in all of the highfalutin terms that you want, but in the end, it comes down to something quite simple: it’s a way for those who eschew achievement, merit, honesty, and perseverance to get ahead on the dubious grounds of identity. It’s a con game designed to pour money into the coffers of those for whom a genuine work ethic is anathema.

It's plain and simple grift, endorsed by our own government and institutions of higher education. You know, the same people who are supposed to be watching out for such things on our behalf. 

The trick is to be prepared

From On Point: Six Strategic Challenges For 2024 by Austin Bay.

The six challenges he identifies.  Click the link to read his articulation and elaboration on each.

Challenge No. 1: Imperialist powers bent on recovering lost empires (and fulfilling the grandiose dreams of their current leaders.) 2023 comment: Russia in Ukraine, China threatening Taiwan. 2024 comment: Imperial Iran bent on recovering Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persian Gulf.

[snip]

Challenge No. 2: Radical, militant, megalomaniacal dictatorships (North Korea) and terrorist organizations (the Islamic State group) attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological) and the ways and means to use them to kill with history-changing, lethal surprise.

Challenge No. 3: The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals and venal institutions in democratic nations. The corruption is so internally corrosive to these nations that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges Nos. 1 through 3 is systemically delayed, undermined or immobilized.

Challenge No. 4: Big Debt. It was No. 5 last year but it is a byproduct of No. 4's political corruption and malfeasance. 2022's hyperinflation and government budget excess justified it last year. Now the inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action. Fact: Big Debt has become unsustainable.

Challenge No. 5: Flailing states, failed states and totally fake states immersed in anarchic violence that spills over political borders. (Note: "Flailing" means collapsing. In fake states, local thugs control the capital, the U.N. seat and little else.) 2023 comment applicable to 2024: During the past year, Mexico has been exposed as a borderline flailing state.

Challenge No. 6: America's Southern Front. In 2023, "flailing states" (states immersed in anarchic violence that spills over political borders or states unable to control their own borders) were challenge No. 2. America's southern border crisis has created a hybrid war front --California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas are a hybrid-war front line.

Hard numbers get you closer to useful truths

A very useful central repository of well-documented information which is contested rhetorically.  From Crime in the USA by Inquisitive Bird.  The subheading is A short primer and collection of basic descriptive facts.  

The data behind this chart is well known to those that follow the subject but not among the general public.  

Click to enlarge.

The rise in murder rates in the recent era follows the Ferguson riots in 2014 and is largely driven by murders in select neighborhoods in particular cities which have either defunded police or, more commonly, simply indulged in depolicing.  They kept the police but wouldn't let them conduct ordinary policing functions.

Megan McArdle, among others, established several years ago the falsity of the canard that American prisons are stuffed with people who committed minor drug offenses.  She looked into it and found that that simply was not true.  That if you were in prison, you were there for acts of violence.  Inquisitive Bird acknowledges the fact and brings an interesting alternative perspective.

A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses. In fact, only a small fraction of prisoners are there for mere drug offenses (see section Prisoners by offense type). The reality is that the high incarceration rate is largely a consequence of the high rate of violent crime in America. Excluding prisoners imprisoned for non-violent crimes, the prisoner rate remains higher than any of the 24 other countries in the above list — if the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is worth emphasizing:

If the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is strongly suggestive that the issue is less about policy and judicial practice and more about the reality of crime in America.  My point for a long time has been that as a multinational and multicultural country, we can clearly see that crime commission is very much a function of cultural norms.  Policy does have a material influence but the basic driver is cultural norms.  The same policies in different jurisdictions with different cultural norms have dramatically different outcomes.

Inquisitive Bird makes another point which I have seen discussed and about which I remain unresolved.

A natural question is how high the America’s incarceration rate is in comparison with its rate of serious crime. To analyze this, Lewis & Usmani (2022) compared First World countries in terms of their number of prisoners per homicide, instead of the usual prisoners relative to population size. They find that the American prisoner/homicide ratio is about average for the First World, whereas the number of police per homicide is very low. In this sense, when compared to the rate of serious violent crime, the American prisoner rate is unexceptional, but its number of police is exceptionally low.

I have lived in six other countries and worked extensively in another dozen.  The police force structure in countries is highly variable and counting the number of police is challenging.  Even in the US it is quite murky.  Local police?  Relatively easy.  Armed security officers in the private sector?  Usually not included but shouldn't they be?  Armed state level agents?  Armed federal agents such as the FBI?  Armed Park Services employees?  And so on.  I am very leery that anyone has a good apples-apples headcount of "police" between countries.  

So my concern is about the facts rather than the conclusions.  If you accept the facts as Inquisitive Bird has presented them, then the analytic conclusion is interesting.  The salient facts would be.

1) America has a much higher murder rate than other developed nations but it is highly concentrated geographically.

2) American police are equally effective at finding and convicting murderers as are our developed nation peers (prisoners per homicide)

3) American security is lower than peer developed nations because we have so many fewer police.

Conclusion 1 is reasonably secure.

Conclusion 2 is plausibly true but with some definitional caveats.

Conclusion 3 might be true but is very dependent on an accurate headcount in all comparison countries with highly variant civil security force structures.  

The whole piece is an excellent piece of work and should be the basis for discussion on how we efficiently and effectively provide greater security to all citizens, both tactically and strategically.  Regrettably, the numbers in the article are politically anathema and therefore won't be addressed.